Advertisements over internet form a major chunk of the marketing expenditure of companies these days. With many people spending a major amount of their time surfing on social networking sites, e-commerce websites, email, search engines, there are plenty of opportunities for brand promotion and marketing of products and services on these platforms.

Moreover, there are ways to measure the effectiveness of these ads on internet by recording number of clicks and using modern analytic systems.

However, as much as these platforms are effective, there are many pitfalls and hurdles as well in these kinds of campaigns. This is mainly due to the presence of many malicious automated bots and blindspots which can lead to false feedbacks and impressions to advertisers and publishers about the reach and effectiveness of their ad campaigns.

Simpli5d is an Audience Intelligence Platform which is trying to solve this problem of Viewability, Ad Fraud & Audience Engagement across formats and platforms via gamut of its products. Founded in 2012 by Mittal and Sidharth Oswal, Simpli5d Platform is ideal for advertisers who need to reach real human audience and engage the users with their brands.

Simpli5d offers three products through its patent pending technology based on natural language processing (NLP), namely NLPCaptcha, NLPVideo, NLPMobile & Koment Box. These products ensure two way engagements for brands in a bot free environment. This technology & platform not just helps advertisers in saving their ad spends from bots but also helps various publishers (website Owners) to secure their site from bots and enhance user engagement on their portals.

How It Works

Remember that distorted image at multiple places during login/registration/comments/COD etc where one has to figure out the right letters to prove they are human and not bots ? These are called Captchas, and no matter how silly filling them sounds, they are the ones safeguarding websites and blogs from spam and other malicious attacks.

Simpli5d technologies makes Captcha an integral part of their products. They provide an engaging Captcha for brands wherein the user engages with the brand by filling the brand message or engaging with the brand across its publisher reach to ensure two way real human engagement with the brand.

Further, this is not just restricted to Captcha and Simpli5d also provides similar solutions on Video pre-roll to ensure there is two way engagement with the brand in the pre-roll as well and not just restricted to blind video views. In general in a video pre-roll campaign the brand is not sure if the video has in reality attracted the eyeballs of the consumer. All these solutions are also available on mobile.

According to an internal study by the company, over 56% of the overall Internet traffic is driven by ad frauds and 56% ads on websites are never viewed globally. Its disruptive anti-fraud technology helps to curb this problem by providing benefits to both advertisers and publishers.

The brand message of advertiser is viewable as the user has engaged with the same and he is paying for the users who have interacted with the brand. He is assured that it is a real human and not a bot. Simpli5d’s patent pending Captcha technology ensures to take care that the bots are filtered here with various levels of security checks.

On the other hand, a publisher has a new stream of revenue as well as a secure portal which helps him to save his real estate cost by filtering the bots. Apart from this now the publishers have also started monetising the freemium content via Simpli5d Products to generate additional revenues.

The Tech

The market size of an audience intelligence platform like Simpli5d is a massive $59 billion globally. However, there are still very few players operating in this space with almost no direct competitors for the same in India.

Most of the firms in the Ad-tech environment act as mediators between publishers and advertisers to drive ROI and results. All the tech providers either provide one solution or the other based on third party data. In order to ensure “Real Humans + Real Engagement + Right Targeting” one needs to have accurate data.

Simpli5d by virtue of its products provides real engagement and ensures self generating data via a feedback loop to ensure real humans and right targeting. The eco-system that Simpli5d has developed is not only unique, but it has challenged the effectiveness of many constants of Digital advertising.

Until now, more than 50% of the advertising spends for brands were either consumed by bots or went to a wrong target. Here is where Simpli5d comes in. It provides right targeting with the help of millions of profile it has based on interest that a person shows during their browsing.

This, coupled with its NLPCaptcha technology, which distinguishes a human from a bot, has disrupted the current practices and presents an interesting use case for brands to save their spends from being consumed by bots.

Simpli5d products generate a huge amount of data by virtue of their integration within publishers. The algorithm & technology then segregates and buckets this data into Human & Non-Human. The data also helps us to profile audience on their browsing behaviour. Based on these inputs, the technology can determine if an ad request is from a bot or a real human.

Apart from this a lot of analysis goes in determining if the ad is in a viewability frame. The data is more accurate since captcha as a tool is used to filter bots. Hence, once the user has solved NLPCaptcha it is confirmed that it is a real human data. Hence, with the accuracy & intelligence from Simpli5d ensures Real Human Engagements on its platforms.

However, the real strength of Simpli5d lies in its patent-pending tech which ensuresthat Simpli5d’s captcha is not affected by ad-blockers. The captcha is designed in such a way that it is not an ad-platform but a security platform.

Secondly, there is a complete integration processfor varioustech platformsto integrate NLPCaptcha. It is not a plain vanilla Javascript call to run an advertisement but a deep rooted integration on the publisher sites. The captcha is validated to distinguish bots and it gets tougher to solve in case a bot activity is detected. All these factors right from integration process to security triggers ensure that it is not affected by ad-blockers.

The Road Ahead

Till now, Simpli5d has raised undisclosed amount of funding from two rounds, the latest being held in October last year. The company has raised funding from YourNest Angel Fund, Udaan Angel partners, Dhiraj Jain in these rounds to fuel their growth plans. It is also expanding its tech team to provide more holistic solutions to all the stakeholders.

It works on revenue sharing basis with brands and is currently working with over 100 brands in the e-commerce, FMCG, telecom, travel, auto and electronics sectors. Horlicks, Hindustan Unilever Ltd, Toyota, Acer, Quickr, Lenskart, Zovi, Lufthansa, British Airways, Axis Bank, Airtel, P&G and Ibibo are some of the renowned brands working with Simpli5d platform.

It has also partnered with publishers like Sify.com, OneIndia, DailyMotion etc for advertisements. The company claims to have 51 million audience profiles. In addition to India, the company is also operational in Spain & Thailand with sales offices in Mumbai, Bangkok and Madrid.

Now, the company further intends to establish its presence in SE Markets in coming times. It also intends to enable the use of its technology for third party as well to server all formats of advertisement & prevent ad frauds.

A more interesting move, which the company is planning, is to open up its NLP Captcha tech API for advertisements across properties/products and not just restricted to Simpli5d Products.